The market incentives are not there, why not try finding those first?
What other alternatives are there when the market has clearly demonstrated that it's not going to regulate itself in favor of the customers?
Understand that companies have a perverse incentive to kill games that are genuinely good in their own right: People may not buy a new game if they're still playing and replaying a slightly older one.
Doubly so in this case where the perverse incentive to kill games that game studios have doesn't depend on how well a game does. They have every incentive to kill every old game they make regardless of how well it does because they always want to sell you their new game no matter what. Not buying a game won't make it not die.
It's also a totally unnecessary entertainment product, so the fact that people keep buying it shows they're happy enough with it.
This is self-evidently false, given that people are upset enough about it to make this petition... Unless you meant "best" in a different sense? Not sure what you mean by this. To me it's obvious that killing a game and making it unplayable forever is perhaps the worst possible tradeoff.
Also, I was always in that group, refusing to pay upfront for an online-only game, but I acknowledge most people don't really care.
But given current trends, I'm inclined to simply think a lot of people don't mind that risk. So I'm simply a minority in the matter, as usual. If they don't care, why should I (who's already mostly walked away) care?
There's no incentive to keep a game alive after the server costs outlive the monthly income generated. Only a handful of games have been kept alive out of pure preservation or low cost (or in some cases, because the publishers just forgot about it).
Regulation might be necessary since in the last 8 years of gaming, less and less games have been able to be preserved. And we had had outrageous examples like, The Crew, where fans have been able to reverse engineer an analogue to Ubisoft's servers in less than a year. Ubisoft have no incentive, so maybe it is time they are forced to.
What I'm getting at, is if all creative souls are required to front a guarantee of eternal commitment to their creations, we will see a good deal less novelty.
I agree, we should make companies actually pay for copyright protection (by ensuring the works are available after the copyright period) instead of just giving it them for free. That would fix the incentives of corportations to design games and other products to disappear.